Letter: Making better use of £3 billion
The BBC's Roger Harrabin, who is an environmental journalist not an energy or engineering one, and certainly not an engineer, says we're not to worry about the lights going out, thanks to windmills and solar arrays.
Apparently the Government in all its genius has come up with a startling plan to make everything alright. In gleeful tones Harrabin announced that things would be just hunky-dory all the way through to 2020, which he seems to regard as a distant horizon.
The two-part plan mostly involves paying old out-of-date gas and coal generators special new subsidies to persuade them not to entirely close them down, now that the subsidies to wind farms and solar arrays have made them unprofitable. Provided they keep them ticking over, and provide emergency (hugely expensive) back-up whenever needed, they're guaranteed to make more money. Our money.
It seems, however, that it is perfectly possible that even with part one in place, paid for by your increased bills, there is still a risk of the lights going out. So the second part of this awe-inspiring two-part scheme is this – the Government has offered large (further) subsidies to big industrial electricity users, to shut down, pack up and go home when there is "too much" demand and not enough supply.
The workers presumably would be laid-off.
People may recall the days of yore, when the idea was to keep the economy going by producing electricity to match the demand. The new idea is the opposite – cut demand to match dwindling supply. That should be good for Britain's lonely ploughing of our economic furrow across the shining uplands of world trade once we're out of Europe and into the hands of The Donald, don't you think?
The additional cost of this latest iteration of energy planning brilliance is estimated at around £3 billion.
That's on top of everything else. I wonder if a hospital or two, or perhaps a school could have made any use of a bit of it.
Bob Trueman, Llanfair Caereinion
